NCU and HTC in Collaboration Won the Second Place Award of the XPRIZE Global Medical Competition
NCU and HTC in collaboration won the Second Place Award of the XPRIZE global medical competition. The photo is from the official website of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE
The Dynamical Biomarkers Group, led by NCU and HTC and formed by the team from Harvard University in the USA and the top biomedical research groups from Taiwan, participated in the biggest medical competition in history, the “Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE.” After going through the competition for more than three years, the Dynamical Biomarkers Group won the Second Place Award in the end and was awarded one million US dollars.
Besides meeting the requirements of precisely monitoring 5 vital signs and accurately diagnosing 13 diseases, the most challenging part of this competition was to design a device that is easy to operate and weighs less than 5 pounds to meet the requirements of home care by everyday users.
Beating more than 300 teams from around the world in this fierce competition, the team led by NCU and HTC finally won the Second Place Award. The Dynamical Biomarkers Group also includes the biomedical teams from National Taiwan University, National Taiwan University Hospital, National Tsing Hua University, National Cheng Kung University, Taipei Medical University, Cathay General Hospital, and Landseed Hospital.
Jou Jing-yang, President of NCU, pointed out that the key to the victory of the Taiwanese team this time is the cross-disciplinary and cross-campus collaboration. Doctors led diagnostic strategies, professors and researchers developed new technologies, and HTC, the prominent manufacturer of cell phones, provided machine learning techniques and designed user interfaces. They worked together to transform complicated medical tests into a simple, easy, and autonomous mode of home care.
Wang Xue-hong (Cher Wang), Chairperson and CEO of HTC, indicated that the device “DeepQ” developed by the team is a good paradigm of industry-university collaboration. HTC highly admires this competition’s great ideas to deliver accessible quality medical care to everywhere through technology.
In response to aging population and decreasing birth rate, the ideas of “prevention is more important than treatment” and “precision medicine” are more and more important. Applying DeepQ to homes or remote areas will be a key step in implementing preventive medicine and can reduce rising medical costs. In the future, medical care will no longer be limited to a hospital. “Hospitals without walls” are just around the corner.
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